


Mr. Mustang

by whisperbird



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-29
Updated: 2013-01-29
Packaged: 2017-11-27 10:14:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/660796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whisperbird/pseuds/whisperbird
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Young!Royai. Riza encounters Roy on a Sunday morning and comes to terms with a few mental loose ends she's been grappling with.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mr. Mustang

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first FMA fic, and my first time writing Riza. I seem to slip into a female voice more easily than a male, huh. Anyway, enjoy!

Riza had no real concrete feelings on the glut of nightmares she’d experienced lately.  She’d sit up in bed, sheets twisted around her like a pair of dominant arms intent on pulling her back into sleep. She was always sweaty, her mattress moved from the wall but upon waking she’d feel no real threat, no real terror, only a disgusting, lingering feeling she couldn’t place a finger on _exactly_. It felt more like loneliness than anything and she only felt it most acutely upon waking and it would fade gradually. For those times she felt it, the feeling left over from the dream, it would be the most all-encompassing dark loneliness she’d ever felt.

  She couldn’t remember the dreams except in the vaguest terms. Restraint and isolation seemed to bubble below the surface of the dreamscapes: she was alone, she was drowning, or she was lost in the woods. Those terrors were only second to the feeling that she couldn’t place. It was the feeling that whatever was below the surface of the dreams was the real nightmare; it was the thing her fingernails mentally scrabbled upon, never fully to grasp or understand.

Riza figured it was morning or close to it. The air had the crisp, cold feeling of a new day and she remembered it was Sunday, and considered not getting out of bed for a few precious more hours. But her sheets were _soaked_ and she felt she’d been running through the woods, that frantic, uneven kind of dashing. Maybe she’d been running in her dreams. She didn’t recall. It was an “empty” morning, as she called them, lacking the lingering dream feeling leftovers. That in itself was a good reason to get out of bed. Next time she wouldn’t be so lucky, perhaps. She felt more compelled to get out of bed on days she didn’t have school as well.

What was school, anyway? Just another place for her to sit by herself, mind her own business and be prodded by other girls into talking, girls trying to be nice and goad her from her shyness, that’s what school was. School was just another place that taught her how to avoid.

In the hallway outside her bedroom there was an old clock with a mirrored back. It was always the first thing that greeted Riza when she opened her door: her face, hair she kept short tousled from sleep and the clock ticking off the minutes until the next hour, the next day. The floors were perpetually dusty despite her best efforts and if she missed a few days of attempted sweeping there were shiny footprints leading from her room to the bathroom, the wooden floor gleaming below the decay.

 There was once a maid who came, when her mother had been alive and her mother had done household tasks as well, just a few things like cook. Riza learned by trial-and-error now and realized she was no fine housekeeper, which was acceptable to Riza. Her father didn’t care one way or the other. He lived for his study, his books and alchemy. If he could eat alchemy and devour knowledge and keep himself powered by only his own academic appetite, maybe food wouldn’t be so hard a task to keep up with. He’d be happier that way, surely; maybe he wouldn’t have such a hollow look in his eyes if the only thing he’d ever had to take care of was alchemy. It was like that anyway after a fashion. The look in his eyes scared her. She wondered sometimes if he saw her mother looking back at him, or if he was looking past Riza, to something only understandable to him.

Her father didn’t eat much anyway, and Riza stopped giving him plates when he wouldn’t leave his study. She’d return hours later to cold, wasted food. And Roy sustained himself. He had money of his own and he ate hurriedly with them some mornings and presumably prepared his own lunches.

Riza felt strange when she thought of him as Roy because for the first few months she referred to him as “that boy” or “him”, mentally at least. Her father requested she call him Mr. Mustang and Roy always had a guilty look when she addressed him as such, the way someone would look when servers at a restaurant are fawning ridiculously over important clientele and embarrassing themselves. The look sighed and said, _don’t make a big deal_. Riza called him Roy now in her head and maybe would progress to saying it to him out loud if they had a moment together. He’d been here seven months and they didn’t have a lot of moments alone so it would be awkward, to say the least.

Seeing as it _was_ 4:45 am, she wondered if Roy was asleep and walked back into her room to change into pants from a nightgown on the off chance he wasn’t. Her father wouldn’t be up until 7 at least, so her (perhaps fifteen) minutes of slovenly dress would be cut short by an unexpected arrival or awakening by Roy. He didn’t make her uncomfortable, exactly. He had an unassuming but happy presence and teaching him alchemy had given her father a reason to focus on something.  He didn’t say much to Riza now that Roy was here and Riza didn’t find herself wanting for a conversation that much anyway. His alchemy gave her father something to live for, and Riza wondered sometimes if she’d ever get older and exhausted and need to find something or someone to live for. Right now she tried to take care of the household; that was her purpose. Maybe she’d find it and wouldn’t have to search for reason in what she already had found, even at a young age, was a reason-less world. These were such thoughts she wondered if she ought to be thinking, because they made her feel tired.

Her face greeted her once more in the clock, now properly dressed, in a manner of speaking. She wore skirts to school and on weekends yearned for the feeling of her wool pants and a worn-out pair of boots and sweater. She wasn’t trying to impress anyone, certainly not that Roy. He had his own things to look after and even though he wasn’t much older than Riza she doubted they’d be compatible friends anyway. Boys at her school seemed … not precisely bored by her, but put off by her serious nature. She had never screamed and carried on like the other girls. She didn’t want to be seen as a cold fish, really, but she couldn’t be someone she wasn’t. Boys liked girls who were bursting at the seams with life and played hard to get and threw their heads back and laughed, long hair catching in the sunlight. Riza didn’t even have the long hair to catch in the sunlight. She _preferred_ it short.

She was thinking of hair and how she was due for a cut and the floor was due for a sweeping, especially the worn rug at the top of the stairs because it was filthy and couldn’t be ignored anymore when she walked into the kitchen and right past Roy Mustang, sitting at the dining room table, drinking a glass of milk, calmly reading a book by a candle, minding his own business. She didn’t notice him so much at first, picking sleep from her eyelashes, then felt a presence and fumbled for some light.

The kitchen was adjacent to the dining room, joined by a door and the light from the kitchen fell upon Roy, looking startled. He looked more startled than he should’ve been, in a calm, quiet house while reading a book. His eyes were wide, and he held up a hand, then closed his eyes and breathed deeply.  A “give me a moment” gesture.

Who was _he_ to be scared? Riza had been ready to dart to the large cabinet in the corner of the kitchen for a frying pan to take out an enemy. Fight or flight response. Riza always chose to “fight” but with a large blunt object. It was only smart.

“Did I scare you?” asked Riza incredulously, in no mood to be accommodating to someone who had almost simultaneously given her a heart attack and made her give him a concussion.  She was a fair bit annoyed, but a little more fascinated now by the always _cool_ Roy looking like a scared little boy, even for a second. It was pretty funny, all things considered.

“Yes,” he said, opening his eyes. “I didn’t expect you to come down so suddenly.”

“In my own house?”

“At four in the morning on a Sunday,” he countered, lightly. “It could’ve been a _lot_ of things.”

Roy was back to looking calm, even a bit amused. When he’d first come to their house, she’d thought to herself he was handsome and felt slightly strange having that thought because it would make things complicated to have a crush on someone who’d be in her house for a few years. She didn’t want to set herself up for being embarrassed, so she let it go on a, “yes, he _is_ a cute, polite boy.” It hadn’t been that hard, in theory, because she’d always been a little sore at the thought of being friends with people near her age, especially boys.

He had a round face that made him look much younger than his age, and dark eyes; she guessed the kind of things girls liked. She had to separate the two. He wasn’t a cute boy from the village -- he was Mr. Mustang, her father’s apprentice. He was clean-cut, polite, and good-natured. _A clean-cut, polite and good-natured apprentice of her father’s_. Though it hadn’t been hard to divorce the two, there had been a smidge of resentment that she had had to, for a number of reasons. One, he was the kind of boy who made girls laugh and blush and she did neither and two, her father wouldn’t appreciate any fraternization.

He looked a little sleepy by the light of the candle and he smiled at her, also sleepily.

“You should’ve seen your face, though,” he said. He propped his chin on his hands. “You would’ve killed me with something.”

“What makes you say that?” She walked to the icebox and began looking to see, a bit childishly, if he’d taken the last of the milk.

“It was a scary look, Riza,” he conceded. Her name settled on her like an unexpected sensation, something so hot to the touch it felt cold, and she stiffened a bit. It went unnoticed by Roy, obviously.

“Did you just wake up?” he tried again, when Riza didn’t respond. She’d truthfully been a little embarrassed at her reaction to him saying her name. The familiarity was always odd and she still wasn’t used to it.

“Did you?” she asked, head still inside the icebox.

“Oh, me? Oh, no, no,” he said. “I’m just getting in. Your father wanted me to read something by tomorrow and I didn’t have time last night. I wasn’t really in the mind to. I figured I’d do it then sleep a bit before he wakes up. I’ve got at least until seven on the weekends.”

Riza seized the milk and made of a show of sizing up the amount inside of it. Roy didn’t take the bait.

“What’s there to do in this town that requires you to be out all night?” she asked, skeptically. She wasn’t trying to be prying, but rather a little astounded he’d found enough to do.

“There’s a pretty lively bar!”

She set the milk back into the icebox and shut it a little too hard.

“And people are willing to serve you drinks then?”

Roy seemed at ease now that she was talking. This was the most they’d spoken and it pleased him, apparently. Riza’s amusement had faded a bit and her annoyance had gotten a bit more acute. Him addressing her so casually, and him drinking the milk, and him scaring her were basic things to be bothered over.

Truthfully, she didn’t particularly know how to deal with him. She didn’t know what girls were supposed to say to boys, especially in this weird situation anyway. It was a variety of weird situations. Not only was this someone she’d been told to address formally and in essence keep a polite distance from, but now they were alone, early in the morning and he was telling her his drinking stories, in a manner of speaking.

Riza’s only reaction she felt at ease with at the moment was to be a _small bit_ antagonistic. She knew in the back of her mind that was kind ingenuous, but damned if they were going to be friends now.

Roy was trying though. She tried to make her shoulders less rigid, in an effort to make her words come out less stern.

Roy laughed at her suggestion of him buying himself drinks. “I don’t drink a lot, but …” He looked around briefly, dark eyes darting to one corner of his eyes and then the next. “You meet nice people who want to have fun. Sometimes you have to meet the right people to get what you need.”

“Like older girls?” She winced mentally.

Roy took a sip of milk to keep from answering. _Boys._

“Do you ever find anything to do here?” he asked, after a second, setting his half-full glass of milk on the bare, pock-marked dining room table. His voice had a lilt of honesty to it.

Riza’s first nature regarding boys was that when they weren’t trying to make you laugh and charm you, they’d try and tease you and make you feel like an idiot. Roy wasn’t trying to do either of these things. His question was one said to gauge her maturity or make her feel like a dumb little girl. She felt he was being, in general, a genuine person at the moment.  It seemed out of his nature, what she’d seen so far, to harass her in such a way, or to badger her into feeling silly.

She felt the little insights into his personality had only been in snatches. She’d put them away, stuffed them into a glass jar in her mind, like pieces of paper covered in her neat, precise hand-writing. The papers—the memories, insights, had said things like, “Roy has a nice singing voice” and “sometimes when he thinks no one is around he’ll whistle a song (always the same song)” and “I heard him say some pretty awful words once when he hit his foot on the stairs (he didn’t know I was behind him.)”

She’d filed them away, because Roy was Mr. Mustang and keeping them on the forefront of her memory, in a recognizable setting, they would do no good and only serve, as she’d thought, to make her uncomfortable and embarrassed. What would she do with things remembered about him anyway? When he was gone, she’d think, “Mr. Mustang liked to drink milk in the mornings instead of eating breakfast.” And “Mr. Mustang was startled once when I sneaked up on him.”

She didn’t want them to say things like, “Roy made my father have a purpose”, or “Roy filled the house with a presence of living” or “Roy made me laugh once, when I heard him stub his toe and swear.”

She didn’t want the memories to be fresh and to say “Roy”.

“Well, Mr. Mustang,” she said, leaning against the icebox. “The kids in the village do things together. Sometimes they go hunting or fishing. Maybe you’d find someone to go hiking with.”

She looked at the window, the one uncovered above the door. In the window was the dark early morning outside, and the faint reflection of her face, hair she preferred to keep short and an expression she couldn’t keep from being slightly bitter now.

“There’s a nice little hilly area nearby, people like to hike there.”

She didn’t look at Roy, but she could hear a faint smile in his voice. “That’d be nice. I’m from the city, you know. Not a lot of nice hilly areas. It’s really different here in the country. It’s like time moves slower.”  


Riza looked out of the corner of her eye and saw he was smiling, but it seemed a little vague. Maybe it was because he was tired. “Can you make coffee, Riza?”

 _Riza_.

“Are you asking me if I can or if I will?”

“Both. And please, I didn’t want to say anything while your father was here, but call me Roy. I’m Roy.”

“You should sleep,” she answered, and felt the need to look down at her hands, instead of back at Roy. Her knuckles were knobby, skin pale with blue veins running over her wrists, short, neat fingernails.

“I think I need to sober up a bit. Doesn’t coffee help sober you up?”

“I’m not sure.” _Roy_ , she added.

“I’m sorry I drank so much milk, I thought it might sober me up.”

“Is milk supposed to?” _Roy_ , she added.

She felt bad for her previous reaction to antagonize him. She didn’t know if it was him saying her name, but she felt like she should talk, she should say something. She just looked at him sidelong instead.

It was the dream feeling. It was that gross, lingering dream feeling. The loneliness. The more they talked, the more she felt it. She’d gone through a cycle of emotions in the span of one conversation and she filed that away as well.  _Roy, Mr. Mustang, my father’s apprentice made me feel …._

“That’s probably water,” he muttered. “Damn, I shouldn’t have wasted so much time tonight. Your father doesn’t like it when I slack off any bit.” He pulled a pained expression. “You know, I’m a hard-worker, I mean I really think I am, but I like to have fun too.” He put his chin back into his hands into an open palm. “I’ve been told I’m lazy before. _The hell_ I’m lazy.” His voice was muffled and sounded a bit petulant.

He seemed so blissfully unaware the affect the simple act of him conversing had had on her.

He straightened up. “Your father doesn’t think I’m lazy, though.” He smiled. “Your father’s taught me a lot and I’m grateful.  I want to make him proud.”

He laughed suddenly. “Maybe I’m not as sober as I thought!”

“Why?” asked Riza, quietly.

Roy said nothing.

“Is wanting someone to appreciate what you do that bad?”

_Roy._

“Not really,” he said. “I just feel kind of ridiculous admitting that.”

Riza had the sudden urge to walk over to Roy, and sit next to him at the table. She didn’t know if it was the surfeit of isolated feelings reaching their pinnacle or the fact that maybe she’d admitted to herself she was lonely or the fact that Roy’s voice had taken on that almost, careless, genuine tone again. As though he was forgetting they weren’t close, they weren’t friends, but treating her with warmth anyway. It was endearing, in the way seeing his scared face had been endearing. In the way the little moments of him being Roy unnoticed were endearing.

She wanted to sit next to him, and maybe not say anything, but let him know that there was nothing ridiculous about wanting to be valued.

Instead, she balled her hands into fists, neat nails pressing into palms, knobby knuckles turning white and resisted the urge.

It was quiet for a brief moment, only seconds, before the next thing Roy had said threw her off so completely, the thought of resisting any urge was gone from her mind.

“You know why I got scared?”

“I startled you.”

“Do you believe in ghosts, Riza?”

She knew her face must look either disgusted or puzzled because he laughed and said, “No, I don’t either! But when I came home, I was drunk, I’ll admit that. When I walked home it was dark and I was a bit … well, you know, I wasn’t in a proper mind to judge things and I thought I felt someone behind me and I got kind of worried. I’ve been kind of spooked ever since. There was nothing behind me,” he clarified. “I just don’t let my guard down like that often. It wasn’t smart of me.”

She tried to stop staring at him so incredulously.

“Why did you ask me if I believed in ghosts?”

“I think people believe in ghosts when they want to hang onto the past. I mean, when people die you hear their family talking about them still rattling something or moving about in the house. I always thought that was really sad.”

“In alchemy,” he went on, “of course, there’s equivalent exchange. You can’t exchange anything for a human soul. Why would there still be human souls, why would we still be here if you couldn’t exchange anything for them? It doesn’t make sense.”

  He stretched, leaning his arms on the table and almost upsetting the half-full glass of milk and candle, which had begun to drip wax onto the table. Another pock-mark, another stain.

“I’ve been sitting here thinking that the entire time,” he confessed, voice muffled in his arms, sleepily, still stretching. He was talking in Riza’s silence. “I thought maybe you’d understand.”

“Why?” She lifted herself from the icebox-lean stance, and for the first time, looked Roy square in the face. She put her hands on the frame of the door.

  He raised his head from his arms and said, “You seem sensible. You have that _look_. You talk like you were already born a hundred years old.” His eyes widened, as though he realized what he’d said. “I don’t mean that in a bad way!”

 He sat up suddenly. “Your father is sort of … jaded. Is jaded the right word? I talked to him about being a state alchemist and he just laughed at me. You seem the in between. Maybe I’m wrong. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“I’m not upset.” Riza lowered her hands to her side.

She wished she could tell him to the depths she was not upset, that she couldn’t deal with him, she couldn’t antagonize him, she liked it when he called her Riza, and she couldn’t do anything with him while he was Mr. Mustang … loneliness or not.

“In any case,” he murmured, standing up. “Forget the coffee; I do not need caffeine in the slightest. I’m going to bed.” He walked past her, closing his book and walked toward the stairs.

She was glad she kept her face impassive, because he turned, smiled and said, “Don’t tell your father I was out late,” and walked up the stairs, waving with the hand not holding the book.

Damn boys, damn boys, damn Roy.

She saw the half-empty glass of milk. She wrinkled her nose. She’d have to ask her father for cenz to buy more and she didn’t want to pour it out, but it was probably warm by now and she didn’t particularly want to drink after anyone.

The candlewax finally dripped onto the table before Riza thought to blow out the candle.

She didn’t want to think right now. She truthfully wanted to go back to bed herself, so she didn’t have to think. Perhaps she’d do just that. Maybe she’d leave that glass of milk there so her father might notice tomorrow, and sleep in herself and incriminate Roy just to spite him for slacking off.

 She remembered the tone in his voice when he’d said, “I want to make him proud,” and against her better judgment, picked up the glass and poured the milk down the sink.

  There was no such thing as a ghost, but there was such a thing as a resistance to change. Maybe she’d inherited that stubborn nature from her father. Ghosts were what was left of someone when the world moved on and you stood still and let it move around you, like her father had. The house would cave in on him and he would stay here, decaying with it. He was the ghost.

She put off the light in the kitchen and walked up the dusty stairs, across the dirty rug and down the hall. She didn’t know why she felt so heavy and light at the same time.

As Riza passed the mirror on the clock, her familiar habit of gazing into was instinctive and she glanced over, and despite herself, smiled.

For a moment, that was the only thing she saw: the look on her face of a faint blush, a smile and the clock, ticking down the minutes ‘til sunrise.                    


End file.
